Right to Die feels like an
old school Tales from the Crypt,
it really does. And that's a good thing. Martin Donovan stars as
a man who survives a horrible car accident that puts his wife in
a charbroiled coma. Now, the only thing keeping her alive is a
plug in the wall, and Donovan feels that things would be best if
she were unplugged. However, the world disagrees and gets all
Terry Schiavo on him. And of course, even if she's in a coma,
Donovan's wife has an opinion about all the shenanigans going on
in her name - and she's none too happy about it. Donovan is
getting visited by his wife in his dreams - and she has a
message for him, one that he'd better listen to. And the folks
profiteering from his situation; they're going to wish they'd
never spoken for her.

Right
to Die works. It's in no way the best of the Masters
of Horror series, but it's certainly well done. It's
directed by Rob Schmidt, who brought us the hillbilly mutant
cannibal flick Wrong Turn, and
though he isn't quite a Master, he's no chopped liver. He shows he's
at least a capable Craftsman of Horror. The story twists and turns,
and features ample T&A and a few good scares - everything you'd
want in a short horror film.

Like all Masters of Horror
titles in this set of reviews, Right to
Die is presented in anamorphic widescreen with Dolby
Digital 5.1 and 2.0 sound. Audio/video is nice all the way around.
These Masters of Horror titles
have a standardized special features set. Here we get gappy
commentary by Schmidt, a pretty standard "making of" piece
called Burnt Offerings: The Making of
Right to Die with interviews of the cast and crew, a look
at the special make-up effects used on Donovan's wife called Flay-o-Trish,
trailers for most of the Masters of
Horror titles, a DVD-ROM accessible script and a photo
gallery.

Based on the Nebula Award-winning short story by James Tiptree,
Jr. (pen name to Alice Sheldon), The
Screwfly Solution is a pretty cool little flick. Joe
Dante, known more for his twisted surrealistic monster flicks
like Piranha, The
Howling and Gremlins,
directs a very paranoid and human tale about a world that learns
a new virus has been unleashed on humanity. This virus causes
males of the species to inexplicably hate women to the point of
uncontrollable violence. Jason Priestly and Elliott Gould star
as the two scientists who discover the new blight on the world
and try to save it.

There's a lot of humanity in this tale, with a nice mix of
science fiction and science fact, along with a climax that
firmly cements itself back in sci-fi. When it's all finished, I
think you'll find that Screwfly
is a terrific little flick. Everything comes together quite
well.

The
script was written by Sam Hamm of Batman
(1989) and Terry Gilliam's proposed version of Watchmen
fame, and it's an awfully faithful adaptation of the Tiptree story.
It would have held its own as a classic Twilight
Zone episode. And surprisingly, the acting is actually
pretty good all around. Dante clearly has a grasp on the story.

Film and audio both look great on DVD. Screwfly
was the first, and I think only, Masters
of Horror shot on HD (I could be wrong on that, so don't
take it as gospel) so it looks good here in anamorphic widescreen.
Sound is Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 (for those who just don't want
that much of an immersive sound field). As for the extras, they are
the same old, same old. There's our commentary, this one with Dante
and Hamm discussing the scriptwriting process, the low budget and
working in Canada. We also get an EPK-styled "making of"
entitled The Cinematic Solution
which is chock full of interviews, a visual effects featurette
called The Exterminators, a
stills gallery, a Joe Dante bio, the screenplay on DVD-ROM and
trailers for most every Masters of Horror
available on DVD.

Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, the men who brought us all
those wonderful H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, return to the world
of Poe (you remember their gory adaptation of The
Pit and the Pendulum don't you?) to bring us a really
wonderful cinematic translation of the oft-adapted Edgar Allen
Poe tale The Black Cat.
The breakthrough here comes on two fronts: One, they've brought
Poe's real life into the story. Two, they've brought Jeffrey
Combs in as Poe himself. What a genius stroke.

It seems that Poe is having trouble getting the bills paid.
Between his boozing and want to write grand poetry that doesn't
sell, he can't make any money. Plus, he can't get the creative
juices flowing. Piling onto those things, his young bride
Virginia is suffering from consumption. Without money, he can't
pay the doctor to take care of her. So one night, alone in his
angst, Poe does battle with his wife's black cat Pluto, which
triggers a horrifying chain of events that haunt Poe until the
well-executed climax.

As
a Poe fan, I have to say that I was quite tickled by the merging of
reality and Poe's phantasmagorical world. As a result, this ends up
being one of my all-time favorite Masters
stories.

No surprise: The Black Cat is
presented in anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0.
Special features include a fun and friendly commentary track by
Gordon and Combs. There's also the behind-the-scenes featurette The
Tell-Tale Cat: Making of the Black Cat with cast and crew
interviews, the Brining down the Ax: A
Look behind the FX of the Black Cat featurette (which is
exactly what it says it is), trailers, a Gordon bio, stills and the
film's script on DVD-ROM.

Masters of Horror creator
Mick Garris directs his own adaptation of a Clive Barker
scriptment, which follows a group of people living in a halfway
house of sorts for unpublished writers. They're all too focused
on their work to be focused on making ends meet. Enter Rob, a
nice enough fella who has received his fair share or rejection
letters and is looking for a place to call home while he dives
heads-deep into his next manuscript. Once he steps foot into
Highberger House, he meets his fellow writers - a group so
creative that their ideas are becoming manifest. Soon he meets
their creation: Valerie, a beautiful woman who is running from
something - something monstrous. Rob stops up and volunteers to
write an ending to their work. The only problem is, not
everything they've created wants to be ended.

Valerie
on the Stairs is interesting enough, but it's just not
good enough. I wouldn't have ever have thought this came from
Barker's mind. Sure, it has some elements that are purely his, but
it just doesn't pack the punch of half the stuff in The
Books of Blood. It's certainly not a failure, but it's
not one of my favorites from this or the previous season of Masters.

I'm sure you're all clambering to know that this one... yes...
features anamorphic widescreen and Dolby Digital 5.1 & 2.0
sound. Video and sound quality is as good as any of the other discs
in this series. Extras include a commentary with Garris, where we
learn that Barker's original treatment called for this to be a more
brutal and explicit story, which is a shame because I think the
watered down nature of this story is what is lacking the Barker
touch. A more brutal sexuality and visceral scares would have made
this one of the better entries in the series instead of one of the
weakest. There's also the behind-the-scenes featurette Spine
Tingler: The Making of Valerie on the Stairs with all the
requisite interviews including Clive Barker, the Jump
Scare: Editing Valerie look at the editing of this film,
a biography of Garris, a stills gallery, the script on DVD-ROM and a
host of Masters trailers.
Lacking unfortunately is Barker's original treatment, which goes so
talked about in the commentary. But if you're curious to read it,
you can find it on Clive's website:
Revelations.

All right, I have a question for master horror novelist John
Farris: Was the short story this film is based on a parody of
Stephen King?

Seriously. It's got all the King trademarks: a killer clown, a
group of kids who experienced something that haunts their
adulthood, a father who has a silly nickname for his son that no
parent would ever have for their kid. Hell, there's even the
symbolic way they figure out to kill the malevolent evil at the
end. It's all here. It's almost like Farris said at some point,
"All right kid, I can play your game just as well as you."

We
All Scream follows a father who comes back to his home
town, where he finds that all of his old friends are disappearing.
There are claims that a man they did a bad bad thing to may be
responsible. William Forsythe plays Buster, a retarded ice cream
vendor who was on the wrong side of a practical joke pulled by a
group of kids. Of course, it's impossible that Buster would be
running around considering, but the set-up works and I'm not going
to spoil the hows and whys of this story (though I'm sure you can
guess them). We All Scream
really does play out like a Stephen King movie, and it's not all
that bad. It's by the numbers, but an hour of your time devoted to a
watchable horror film isn't going to kill you.

The film is presented in anamorphic widescreen that looks good,
supported by nice Dolby Digital 5.1 & 2.0 soundtracks. Extras
are the standard. First we get a commentary track with director Tom
Holland and screenwriter David J. Schow. It's actually a pretty
honest track, with a lot of time devoted to the budget limitations
and some dissatisfaction in the final film. You also get the
featurettes Sweet Revenge: The Making of
We All Scream for Ice Cream and Melt
Down: The Scoop on Visual and Make-up Effects, a photo
gallery, trailers most of the Masters of
Horror and the script via DVD-ROM.

One of the filmmakers that, as a horror film fan I didn't feel
cried out Master of Horror...
yet I didn't cry foul when I heard was making an entry in this
series, is Brad Anderson. This guy really understands the genre,
and with two really great human horror tales under his belt (Session
9 and The Machinist)
it's not surprising at all to know that Sounds
Like is one of the more solid, scary and entertaining
Masters of Horror
episodes.

Chris Bauer stars as Larry Pearce, a software company call
center supervisor, ironically enough. Larry has a special gift:
He can hear everything crystal clear. He spends his days
monitoring his employees for slacking, as he can hear everything
across miles of the city. But it seems that the more stress he
feels, the better his hearing gets.

You
see, Pearce is dealing with the loss of his young son, who died of a
heart ailment. Pearce caught on to the ailment when his gift started
rearing its head, but he caught it too late to save his son. Now
he's living with the guilt, and a wife who wants to move on. He
would rather live with the memory of his son rather than start
over... but then he gets some news that pushes him over the edge:
His wife is pregnant. Now the sounds are starting to overwhelm him
and he's about to go over the edge. I said it above but I restate
it: This is a really great episode. If you see one episode of this
series, this should be the one.

Okay, so we've got anamorphic widescreen, Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0
sound (video and sound quality are great), a commentary with
Anderson (kinda lackluster), the EPK-styled featurette Aural
Madness: The Making of Sounds Like, a featurette about
the sound design and animals used for effects called A
Cacophony of Sounds Like: A Look Behind the Special Effects,
a photo gallery, a DVD-ROM screenplay and trailers galore.

Ya know... I just don't know about this one. It's a bit too
wacky for its own good. Sure, there's some fun to be had here,
but I feel like it just didn't come together well enough during
the shooting or something, because when it's all said and done,
The Washingtonians feels
like two separate flicks. One is the "family learns the
truth about their past" tale that's all too common in
horror films, and the other is an almost Zucker-like parody of
The DaVinci Code or
something like that.

Peter Medak (The Changeling,
The Krays and Romeo
Is Bleeding) directs this short that asks a simple
question: What if everything you knew about George Washington,
and all of his fellow American patriots, was a total
fabrication? What if, in reality, our government (rather - our
society) was based on the concepts of a gang of bloodthirsty
cannibals? Cannibals who still exist as a secret society,
hell-bent on keeping the truth covered up?

That's
the story here in a nutshell. What follows is some gory camp, some
tongue-in-cheek situations and... well, a lot of cheese. This is not
a super great entry, but I have to admit that it's actually a bit of
fun to watch.

As you'd expect, the DVD features a nice looking anamorphic
widescreen transfer with good Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 sound.
Extras include a commentary with Medak and his star Jonathan
Schaech, a behind-the-scenes featurette entitled Feast
on This: The Making of The Washingtonians, a look at the
make-up effects called Wigs, Teeth and
Powder!: The Makeup Effects of The Washingtonians, a
photo gallery, a DVD-ROM screenplay and a selection of trailers.

--

I think there are two or three Masters of
Horror titles left for Season
Two. Season Three's
still up in the air, however Showtime has already said it's not
planning on airing it, so we may be getting it as harder-edged,
straight-to-DVD fare from Lionsgate instead. That may be a good move
for Garris. Once I get the next set of discs, I'll be sure to let
you know what I think.

I'll be back in the next two weeks with a round-up of some new
releases that I've gotten my hands on, including Death
Proof, DOA and Horrors
of Malformed Men. Should be fun.